Researchers discovered that when ICE shows up to a town, the local economy tanks. Businesses lose foot traffic. Jobs disappear. Spending drops. This continues for years.
Minneapolis is still recovering, which means someone's chart probably shows a death cross from 2019 that they're still trying to trade.
The study links enforcement surges to lasting economic damage. Lasting means permanent in research language. Permanent means your calls expired worthless and the underlying never came back.
Here's what happened: ICE arrived. People stopped leaving their houses. Stores lost customers. Employees stopped showing up. Revenue collapsed. Businesses closed. The multiplier effect worked in reverse, which is the only time multipliers actually do what economists say they will.
This is measurable data. Foot traffic metrics. Employment figures. Sales records. The kind of information that would matter if anyone making decisions cared about information.
But you can't trade this. No ticker. No options chain. No three-day moving average to cross over the nine-day so you can convince yourself you found an edge.
The research shows enforcement creates economic depression in targeted areas. Depression is the technical term. Not recession. Not slowdown. Depression. The word we use when an economy stops functioning.
Minneapolis businesses are still trying to recover, which tells you exactly how well that's going. Still trying is what you say when something isn't happening. Like how you're still trying to make back what you lost on that biotech stock that got delisted.
Every retail trader in America could read this study and learn that certain government actions create predictable, lasting economic damage in specific geographic areas. Then they'd go lose money on SPY weeklies anyway because the chart looked bullish.
ICE came to town and nuked the local economy for half a decade, but sure, the real market-moving news is whether the Fed cuts by 25 or 50 basis points.
Photo by Bradley Andrews on Unsplash
Leave a Comment